Posts tagged sciencepolicy

One of my classes this semester is Science & Technology Policy. The first few weeks will entail a lot of history. I’m taking a quick break from reading Science The Endless Frontier A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush from July 1945. It’s the report that essentially set up the National Science Foundation.

The main themes or justifications Bush uses to urge Congress to finally set up a system for the government to support basic science research after World War II. It’s amazing to read a government document that is so supportive of science given the state of anti-science rhetoric from the GOP. 

For one of my lit reviews from last semester, I read a quite ranty paper on the evolution of how we evaluate science in the USA from how many quality scientists are produced from faculty members to how much ROI scientists get from their grants. That flip happened at this same moment that the government decided to finally go all in on supporting scientific research.

For me, it’s quite a fun thing to juxtapose the progress that we have made scientifically in the USA versus how scientists are now judged to be successful (dollars in grants, papers written, etc) and how both sides are very much tied to the federal government getting into the business of science.

OK, off to finish reading the report that got this all started.